Effective control of liquor stock has traditionally been the major problem and concern for owners of establishments which dispense liquors and other types of beverages. A lack of adequate information to insure a consistent stock of liquor as it is dispensed has been one aspect of this problem. Employee responsibility is another aspect. As a result, the potential for a successful liquor dispensing operation has been diminished in the past because of the lack of appropriate informational capabilities to maintain effective control.
Partial attempts at supplying solutions to some of the problems involved in effective control of liquor dispensing establishments have been made in the past. These attempts have only been directed toward partial solutions to the more complex problems of effective overall inventory control. For example, it is known to weigh partially filled beverage containers for the purpose of determining the quantity which has been dispensed over a particular time period. Such measurement arrangements do not address the larger inventory control problem of accounting for all of the bottles or containers, whether they are unused or whether they are partially filled as a result of use. Such weighing devices do not provide the comprehensive inventory and stock control information necessary for effective management and profitable operation of the establishment.
Elaborate systems for controlling the dispensing of beverages have also been devised. In general, these systems require each of the beverages to be dispensed through a machine. By dispensing liquor through the machine, information pertaining to the number of dispensed quantities, the hours of dispensation, and the actual fact of dispensation can all be measured or controlled. Such systems are more in the nature of control systems, rather than systems capable of providing the inventory, management and financial information important in managing a successful business operation.
In the sales of consumer items, it is also known to apply particular types of optical codes to each product and utilize an electronic device for sensing the code to access information particular to the product sold. Such information is used for a variety of different purposes, including inventorying and inventory control. Such arrangements have been primarily contemplated for use in retail vending operations wherein complete containers of products are sold, not where partial contents of products are dispensed from containers. Furthermore, an employee of the seller usually directly accounts for all of the items selected by the consumer at the time the consumer pays for the items, for example the check-out personnel in a grocery market, thereby significantly reducing the possibility for errors in correlating sales of the products with the number of products dispensed from the inventory. While such systems may be useful for deriving information pertaining to the number of whole items sold, such systems are not particularly useful in deriving whole or complete inventory or management information, including, for example, the inventory remaining on-hand or that inventory added or subtracted from the existing stock or that information necessary to correlate dispensed products to sold products when no direct employee accounting for this relationship always exists.
Inventory taking systems for warehouses and the like are also known, wherein each particular item in the warehouse contains some type of an inventory label which may be detected. Such systems are, however, not directly concerned with retail or point of purchase sales or dispensing partial contents from containers of products.